MiphamFan wrote:Which Krishnamurti? The one Anne Besant tried to set up as a World Teacher? I found him rather obnoxious in his interview with Trungpa.

Well, I guess that settles it.

I never said that alone settles it but after watching that and briefly reading about him and some of his writinga, I don't find him very interesting. iirc, Trungpa wasn't very impressed by him either.

'Not impressed' is a considerable understatement.
Krishnamurti's people tried several times to set up a follow-up interview as K. thought he had sold himself short, but CTR made it plain that he had no intention of sharing space with 'that man' a second time.

If you use the word 'mind' without defining your terms I will ask you politely for a definition.
This is not to be awkward. But it's really not self-explanatory.

Even Satanists have Buddha Nature. Even Crowley spoke a pure Dharma from time to time.

That's right. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi also has Buddha Nature and speaks pure Dharma from time to time too.

"My religion is not deceiving myself."Jetsun Milarepa 1052-1135 CE

"Butchers, prostitutes, those guilty of the five most heinous crimes, outcasts, the underprivileged: all are utterly the substance of existence and nothing other than total bliss."The Supreme Source - The Kunjed Gyalpo
The Fundamental Tantra of Dzogchen Semde

His commentary here on a text by Blavatsky derived from Buddhism but mixed with her own Theosophical ideas is quite interesting.

Interesting perhaps, but his contempt, based on ignorance and his generally prideful mind, for the Mahayana approach of Blavatsky's text reveals self-cherishing as his ruling star. Mahayana texts and teachers were not that obscure in his lifetime. There was DT Suzuki's 1907? work on the Mahayana, plus translations of Mahayana sutras in the SBE series at the end of the 19th c.

Like I said, I don't think he understood Mahayana well, possibly due to being conditioned by Hinayana ideas from Bennett.

Nonetheless he did respect Blavatsky's efforts to defend the traditions of the East against misrepresentations by Christian missionaries and apologists such as Chesterton. He defended her in his book "The Sword of Song".

Kim O'Hara wrote:If this motivates you, you may also like to read about Gurdjieff - similar time frame, teaching a 'new' path based on extensive borrowings from an eclectic lot of older traditions, establishing a community for it ... and being, again, a flawed human being.

I read "The Unknowable Gurdjieff" by one of his disciples. It was fantastic. But it didn't go into details about his ideas. Then I read about his ideas.

People will know nothing and everything
Remember nothing and everything
Think nothing and everything
Do nothing and everything
- Machig Labdron

one of the most prominent Gurjieffians in the U.S., Paul Anderson (1897-1983) took a group of his students with him to form the core of the Dzogchen Community in Conway Massachusetts in the mid-1980's.

There are plenty of counter-cultural figures I like and admire. I have even discovered a magician, John Michael Greer, a Druid, whom I think is really interesting and worth knowing about (blog here) . Always had a bit of time for Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (albeit no contact with the schools). But Crowley gives me the creeps. 'Beware the dark side, Luke'.

Wayfarer wrote:There are plenty of counter-cultural figures I like and admire. I have even discovered a magician, John Michael Greer, a Druid, whom I think is really interesting and worth knowing about (blog here) . Always had a bit of time for Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (albeit no contact with the schools). But Crowley gives me the creeps. 'Beware the dark side, Luke'.

Gurdjieff was a lightweight. Crowley, despite his many flaws, actually understood yoga, Etc.

The different sūtras in accord with the emptiness
taught by the Sugata are definitive in meaning;
One can understand that all of those Dharmas in
which a sentient being, individual, or person are taught are provisional in meaning.

Wayfarer wrote:There are plenty of counter-cultural figures I like and admire. I have even discovered a magician, John Michael Greer, a Druid, whom I think is really interesting and worth knowing about (blog here) . Always had a bit of time for Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (albeit no contact with the schools). But Crowley gives me the creeps. 'Beware the dark side, Luke'.

I read JMG regularly, I like some of his posts but he always hated Crowley and is not really being fair to him.

Crowley was prescribed cocaine and heroin when they were still legal, he realized he got addicted, didn't like it and he managed to kick the addictions and only went back on heroin later on because he was prescribed it again, during WWII. His final years were spent in good company, a boarding house for learned men from all walks of life and he regularly entertained interesting visitors of all sorts. At the time of his death, the OTO in America had members successful in their personal lives in various highly placed and connected positions, such as Jack Parsons so JMG's claims that he ran it into the ground are just not tenable.

I'm not saying he was a saint. Tom above make the point that he treated the women in his life badly, which is true, he tended to abandon them when they started becoming alcoholic, or unstable in other ways. But his "dark" reputation is vastly overstated. There is much darker magic than Crowley out there. He wasn't some fluffy bunny (though he loved playing with rabbits in his final years), but he wasn't some kind of inhuman monster.

I find JMG's argument thst Crowley cooked up his own system rsther funny:

It’s a failure that stalks everyone who tries to come up with an original system of magical training without first mastering some existing system from top to bottom, and finding out what systems of magical training are supposed to accomplish. One of the goals of magical training, to turn to technical language for a moment, is the equilibration of the lower self: in less opaque terms, the balancing out of the habitual imbalances of the personality, so that the aspiring mage can use his or her habits of thought and feeling rather than being used by them. Magical systems cooked up by people who haven’t had such a training inevitably miss this; having projected the habitual imbalances of their personalities onto the cosmos—and we all do this, until appropriate disciplines teach us how to stop—they end up reinforcing their imbalances rather than equilibrating them.

If that were the case then there is no useful Western magical system at all. The Golden Dawn system, which Crowley did learn, was cooked up by people who never mastered any existing system, so everything based on them later on would suffer from the same flaw. He does claim that Dion Fortune later reformed the Golden Dawn system to be more balanced, but on what basis I'm not sure exactly. Crowley trained under the masters of the GD system (Allan Bennett, Mathers).

But, if his claims were true, then Vajrayana would be best magical system available.

I'm not really sure why you say that. I'm not an expert on either, but Gurdjieff and his students seem much more interesting to me. ChNN was apparently quite impressed by G's student Paul Anderson as well, and it seems unlikely that a "lightweight" would have produced such a student.

There is not only nothingness because there is always, and always can manifest. - Thinley Norbu Rinpoche

I remember reading somewhere that Paul Anderson's community shifted towards Buddhism and invited ChNN because they felt their Gurdjieff practice was stagnant. I forgot where, might have been an old (1990s to early 2000s) issue of The Mirror.

Gurdjieff and Crowley once met each other and both were quite happy with the encounter.

Crowley has been irking self-proclaimed defenders of convention, middle class morality etc (e.g. Chesterton) since he was alive. Whether he is interesting or not is just a matter of taste, but I think the fact that he rubs againsy middle class manners so much is much of the reason why people dislike him as well as misunderstanding what magic is about.